Lexa
“Look at me.” Kaleb clutches my face between his hands. I can’t see past him. I can’t hear past the echo of Chessie’s scream piercing me from all angles. My chest contorts as I try to fill my lungs with air, but it’s useless. “Lexa, open your eyes.”
I shake my head, blubbering as raised voices erupt all around us. Silas is screaming at the top of his lungs in the language of the fae, but I can’t make out a word he’s saying. It doesn’t matter. I imagine Meg bringing down that sword over and over, and the way Chessie closed her eyes at the last moment before her life was torn from her body.
“NO!” I screech, but Kaleb shakes me violently, trying to drag me out of an anguish induced stupor.
He presses his forehead to mine, panting, as the lifted voices reach a peak. There’s activity all around us, but he shields me from what I assume are the bodies–her body–being dragged from the arena.
“Listen to me,” he breathes against my cheek. “You will go out there and take what’s thrown at you because you must, not because you deserve this. You will move onto the next Trial because these games aren’t worthy of you.”
I shake my head. My cheek brushes against his, against his scruff. I can’t even place myself in time or space. I’m floating above my body, seeing nothing but light and color. Nothing but red.
“You will move onto the next round of the Trials,” he continues hoarsely, “because you’ll see Meg there. You will move on because you will meet her in the ring and do what must be done. Do you understand? Tell me what you’re fighting for today, Lexa.”
Tears slip free from my eyes. I try to shake my head again, but he grips me, forcing me to stay still.
“Tell me what you’re fighting for,” he rasps against the shell of my ear.
“Chessie,” I croak. “I’m fighting for Chessie.”
“Then go.”
He yanks me upright. Gravity hits me like a freight train. The sun is setting over the tall, curved wall of the arena, casting the space in snaking silver shadows as exterior lights flare to life, highlighting streaks of red–pathways of blood.
“Go,” Kaleb repeats, and I move as guards stalk in my direction to drag me kicking and screaming into the arena. I’m sure they’d love that, wouldn’t they? If I cried and begged for mercy, to see my friends face one last time before facing my own death in the fae king’s twisted games?
The guards reach for me, but I shove past them, walking myself through the inner sanctum of the base of the arena, past the barred windows, past sponsors and trainers bagging up the gnarled remains of their dead.
I’m the first in the arena. I stalk out before the first horn blares. Torches dance along the smooth stone railing protecting the crowd of spectators from the beasts within. Beasts like me. Beasts like me who don’t fear death. Beasts who welcome violence. Beasts who know nothing else.
I stand mere inches from the weapons cache in the center of the arena. Cool night air brushes my skin, awakening my sleeping wolf. I feel those gifts stretching through my veins as the last glimmers of sunset slip below the wall and nothing but darkness remains–a cool, empty sky.
The moon is only a sliver tonight. So be it.
I won’t be using my wolf anyway.
The deaths of everyone and everything in the arena would be too clean that way.
I feel rather than hear the soft chuckles and clicks of the four other victors coming up behind me. The strongest. The fittest. The most volatile. The ones the fae heckling me bid their precious gems on.
Out of my peripheral vision, I see a bandaged hand reaching for a sword in the cache–the man who I thought learned a lesson last night by means of my fork, but apparently he needs more lecturing. I have a single second to glance to the left at the entrance of the arena, looking for Kaleb, but he’s gone.
The horn blares. Grates along the walls open to reveal shadows and snarls. I grip the sword the man was reaching toward and swing, screaming with effort. The sound of his now detached arm hitting the ground fades against the pounding claws and deathly snarls of the five rogues racing for me. For us.
The armless man is my bait.
I kick him into the dirt and whirl as my competitors race in every direction, grabbing whatever weapons they can grip. I toss the sword and grip twin blades, a familiar weight in my hands. The crowd above laughs and chants in their strange, musical language, but the blood rushing through my ears drowns them out.
A rogue falls with a crash that sends a sickening vibration through the arena. Four left. Another cuts through one of my competitors like a ragdoll, leaving only three victors standing. I walk at a steady, determined pace down the center of the arena, smiling like a mad-woman, as a rogue sprints in my direction.
My wolf groggily begs to be released after such a long slumber.
Maybe next time.
I run toward the rogue and then fall to my knees at the last possible second, sliding painfully over bloody dirt. The rogue runs over the top of me, chirping in annoyance, but I lift my blades and slice it through its middle.
It stumbles, falling in on itself as it crumbles to the ground several yards away. I can’t risk ending its immortal life humanely, not yet, not when it’s calling to its undead companions who turn my way, ignoring the two other competitors completely.
Rogues are easier to kill than I thought they’d be. Stupid animals, honestly. They make it almost too simple to cut them down, even in my human form with nothing but short blades to do my dirty work. I cut through the first like butter, and then the second one falls, its severed head rolling away seconds later, ending up in the far center of the ring where the one-armed man is trying to claw his way upright to no avail.
Just like that, it’s over.
The two other competitors standing cast wary, but almost grateful, glances at me as I turn to stalk to the man now crawling toward his severed arm. I can live with not being the last one standing during this round, but he’s not coming with us to the next game.
A yelp echoes toward me, followed by an intense rumbling that almost brings me to my knees. A pit nearly swallows me whole. Dirt rushes toward me as the ground beneath my feet gives way. I have mere seconds to leap onto solid ground and keep running against the push and pull of the dirt floor of the arena being sucked into a wide, dark abyss before I’m overcome.
“LEXAAA!” Kaleb’s voice rips over the gasping crowd. I race to the wall, plastering myself against its smooth, bloodstained surface, and look up at the spectators, where Kaleb is sprinting along the ledge, his eyes wild and shining in the torchlight.
A terrified scream breaks my focus. The armless man disappears along with the weapons cache into the pit. One of the other competitors slips, swallowed by the rushing dirt, unable to save himself.
There are only two of us now.
Me and a fully high-fae male now plastered against the wall on the other side of the arena, his wings splayed wide. I’ve yet to see a fae take flight, but I’d guess he doesn’t have that ability here in the arena, just like my wolf was kept tethered, but now… as the scraping of chains and breathy, huffed growls echo from within the pit–I see a single creature. Just one. One really, really fucking big thing.
I realize the game isn’t over yet.
It’s only just begun.
Twin talons pierce the darkness the color of polished alabaster. I press myself against the wall, struggling to catch my breath as a second set, just as sharp and ungodly large as the first, rises from the depths.
Kaleb says my name again, softer this time, a muted plea laced through the syllables I barely catch.
The head is first. Reptilian, wide, and scaled, but with a long, narrow snout. Eyes as large as truck tires scan the arena as the… the…
“Oh, my Goddess,” I whine, struggling to catch my breath as a fucking dragon lifts its body from the pit.
There are tales of these creatures in our folklore. Creatures of the elements–of fire, water, air, and earth. They were guardians of the seas and mountain ranges. Of volcanoes and the skies. They lived in a time before even the earliest gods, and yet, here one stands, and it’s livid.
It roars–a deep, guttural sound that makes my eardrums sing with pain. The ground beneath me shakes violently, forcing me to bend my knees to stay upright, but the crowd above ripples with excitement and applause, loving every second of it.
I’ve never seen a beast like this. It’s… beautiful. Long and lean, it shines in the faint moonlight–washed in dry, cracked silver-blue scales. Wings expand along its back–like a bat, but pearlescent, a kaleidoscope of blues, greens, and silvers. Like water.
A water dragon.
A water dragon bound by iron chains and forced to live within the dirt lined hellscape of the arena.
My competitor is the first to move as the dragon’s body escapes the pit. He swings a sword at the dragon’s long, spiked tail, drawing a deep gash along its silver skin. The dragon bellows in pain but turns to the fae man, opening its narrow jaw wide, revealing pointed teeth, sharp as uncut diamonds. Its tail lashes at my competitor, tossing him several yards into the air, and lets him fall directly onto the top of his head with an audible crunch. He twitches, and the dragon slowly, methodically, uses its tail to scoop the man into the pit–a snack for later.
I can’t swallow. I stay flush against the wall as the dragon slowly looks in my direction, its chains rumbling with the moment.
“Lexa, wake up!” Kaleb screams over the crowd. “You need to move!”
I’ll die this way, I suppose. It could be quick–slow and violent, whichever the dragon prefers. I can’t kill this thing, though. Every fiber of my being… screams to lay down my blades. It’s wrong. It’s against nature to harm something this… amazing. Something trapped here, just like me.
So I do. I drop my blades. They clang to a rest at my feet.
The dragon moves as close as it can. Through slitted eyes, I see the burns on its legs from the chains–from the iron binding its magic, I think, just like silver would burn me. It’s just another prisoner trapped here for their entertainment.
Its breath is hot on my skin. I close my eyes and wait.
“You smell of trees and wheat,” a voice whispers in my head–soft and ethereal.
I open my eyes to a view of teeth and tilt my chin until my neck strains to look at the dragon’s opal-like eyes.
“I can’t kill you,” I whisper out loud. “I won’t do it.”
“Then you’ll fail the games, I fear. What will they do to you, little wolf? Bind you? Chain you? Kill you?”
“I don’t care. My friend–my friend is dead. I don’t–I’d rather go with her than continue the game.”
The crowd titters with excitement as the dragon changes her–I believe it’s a her–position, posed to strike.
Somewhere in the distance, Kaleb has gone silent.
I look at the dragon’s scales–dry and grimy. She was probably exquisite once, back when she was free and able to move through the depths, her spirit blessing the rivers and seas. I bet she glowed.
“Are you the last of your kind?”
“I hope not,” she answers softly, sadly, but her position remains violent, her impressive talons digging deep into the dirt while her tail swishes.
“Can you talk to everyone or just me?”
“Just the pure hearts.”
Her chains dig into her legs, and the air fills with the smell of blood–her blood.
“You don’t belong here,” I whisper, more to myself, as I inspect her manacles. They’re crudely made and massive. It would be easy to sink a blade into its mechanism and… twist….
I look back into her eyes, and into my mind, trying to connect her voice, and say, “Can you still fly? Can you break through whatever magic is keeping you here?”
She seems to understand because the second I crouch, my fingers brushing the hilt of my blades, her dragonish grin lights the space around us.
“Put on a show,” I whisper, and move.
The crowd screams in glee as I sprint from the wall beneath the dragon’s massive, barrel-like torso. She roars, whipping her lumbering body to the side as I weave between her legs. I cry out with the effort of lodging the first blade into the manacle on her left front ankle. The impact reverberates up to my shoulder, jostling me, but I twist the blade until metal snaps.
The dragon roars again, but I’m moving onto the opposite leg, weaving and sliding while she thrashes above me, doing her best to stomp me out of existence.
The crowd believes it. Every second of it.
I have one blade left.
It has to work.
I slam the blade into the lock on her right front leg. It breaks apart on impact.
“Will you come with me, pure heart?” she whispers into my mind.
Freedom flashes before my eyes. I imagine my parents. Nora. My grandparents. Silverhide.
But then I see Chessie's face drawn in pain and confusion, and Meg wielding the sword…
“No,” I whisper back. “I have unfinished business here. Go.”
The dragon goes completely still for a single breath, filling her lungs, her wings expanding so wide they fill the arena. Sudden chaos reshapes the crowd above as the dragon screeches and rears back, her front legs free.
Commands shouted in the fae language blur as I look up, watching the dragon’s belly as she leaps off her hide legs–strong, agile, an ancient beast of a pure kind of magic. Her remaining chains snap like thin thread, and she flaps her wings, causing the spectators to run for cover as debris lifts from the arena, spraying toward the crowd.
I shield my eyes but watch as she breaks through whatever magical veil kept her imprisoned, shattering the invisible dome over the arena, and disappearing like a shadow into the starless night sky.